IT'S ASTROTURRIFIC!

Here's a HufPost story from the Obamacare Town Halls of 2009:

Congressman Steve Kagen, (D-Wisc.) found himself interrupted during a town hall meeting on health care on Thursday evening which, considering the boisterous protests going on at these events all week, wasn’t much of a surprise.

But towards the end of the Wisconsin Democrat’s health care forum something a bit peculiar happened. A woman who initially identified herself as “just a mom from a few blocks away” who was “not affiliated with a political party” was outed by a reporter as a GOP operative who worked for Kagen’s election opponent John Gard as well as the Republican Party of Wisconsin and the Republican National Committee.

Those Town Halls, it turned out, were thick with living astroturf from rightwing PACs and pressure groups who disguised their obstreperous operatives as Just Plain Joes and Janes so people would think their "No Affordable Health Care for Me!" message was genuine Vox Populi. 

Flash forward to the current "critical race theory" controversy, and surprise, conservatives are trying the same thing with the same kind of ringers, a number of whom have been ID'd in this excellent Matt Gertz and Tyler Monroe story at Media Matters:   

Fox has hosted Ian Prior at least 15 times to discuss various “critical race theory” stories, according to Media Matters’ database of weekday cable news guests. Fox hosts and anchors have given him various introductions including “Loudoun County parent”; a “father” who “has gone from concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist”; and “a Loudoun County, Virginia, parent and founder of FightForSchools.com"...

What Fox personalities tend not to mention is Prior’s long career as a Republican political operative. He worked in top communications roles during the 2016 election cycle for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Karl Rove-fronted super PAC American Crossroads, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC that works to elect Republican senators which was founded by allies of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He then spent a year and a half as a top public affairs aide to Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions...

I especially enjoyed Carrie Lukas being identified as “a Virginia mom of five," a “VA mother,” etc. when I've been following her career as a rightwing nut for years. 

You may recall that some of us gave columnist Salena Zito a hard time back when she used to identify Republican operatives as simple salt-of-the-earth types with no political affiliation. Since then she seems to have stopped, which goes to show that even in the rough-and-tumble world of journalism there are limits. But in politics anything goes. I can't wait until John Barron steps to the mic. 

THE DEATH OF THE PET ROCK.

Y'know, most of the time I occupy myself here by making fun of Jonah Goldberg and other mentally defective sinecure jockeys, and part of the reason for that is I don't want to just come to you good people with my opinions. I understand pure opinion, untainted by close reading or analysis or even evidence that the opinionator has walked a time or two around the block, is the real high-stakes game in today's media, and that's why Chris Cillizza is making, what, eleven million dollars to put out shit like "It took Hillary Clinton five days to issue this statement about Harvey Weinstein" (She has, so now we can go back to waiting for Greg Gutfeld to denounce Roger Ailes, I guess) and "Donald Trump is acting like a fifth-grade bully" -- boy, that'll twirl some tassels in the head office, huh fellas! Get a load:

Lyin' Ted. Lil' Marco. Low Energy Jeb. Crooked Hillary. Little Rocket Man. Pocahontas. 

It worked like a charm in the campaign. Trump's voters loved his lack of political correctness. They loved that he called politicians out. They loved that he refused to apologize for anything. 

The laughs Trump got from his name-calling masked a far darker -- and more toxic -- iteration of Trump's bullying.

"Far darker"! [yells into kitchen] Honey, did you know about this? GTFOOH. Trump has been like Pere Ubu meets Idi Amin for two years and suddenly Cillizza is playing Edward R. Murrow.

So I don't want to be that guy, in general and on principle, but you know what, it's been a long day and the last column was pretty good, so what the hell, I figure I can take five, stretch out and bloviate like the big boys a while. So here's what I think about this latest ooh-Trump-did-bad-this-time shit.

The hundred-dollar haircuts have been telling us for months that all the anger at Trump is coming from overeducated sissies like themselves and is therefore invalid -- that you millions-and-in-fact-majority of voters who hate Trump should just get with the Wisdom of the People and accept that squirrel-gun gomers rule America, lauded by their herald Salena Zito (let's see if she's still at it -- "who in D.C. or New York goes to a 'Gun Bash?' Plenty of people do in the West Newtons of the country..." ugh, guess she is). It may have seemed a lot to ask us, to read this defeatism week after week in their magazines and watch it on their newscasts, but the production values were excellent and besides, $100 Haircuts don't care -- they can afford to be self-abnegating, because their post-broadcast cocaine, hookers, and microneedling always lifts their self-esteem considerably. And anyway there were the funny news shows to indulge our alienation and outrage, so the serious newsies could stay all Questions Remain and This is When Trump Became President.

But all of a sudden now everyone is noticing Trump's approval isn't so hot anywhere -- not even in squirrel gun territory. Previous polls had a pall -- maybe those bad numbers were just all those educated, non-crazy majority voters, and we all know they don't count! Now even Bumfuck was standing down. Suddenly the White Working Class Whisperers aren't get the phone calls; J.D. Vance can't get his circus of star-spangled opioid addicts booked till Christmas.

Are the yokels coming around? I have a hunch on which I would so far lay only small money but, like I said, it's my day off so here goes: I don't think anybody has changed their minds. I think what they changed was the channel.

There have been plenty of people who would roar "hell yeah" every time Trump peed in the pool and a pollster asked about it. But it wasn't because they loved him. What America experienced last November was not so much a groundswell as a shrug: why not, at least it'll be fun. And it might even work.

I still believe a lot (not all!) of them are racist, sexist shitheels -- I believe this because I've seen them. But even shitheels have lives to live, just like the rest of us. And like the commercial fads that used to briefly animate the heartland in the dull years between conflagrations -- disco and boot-scootin' and C.B. radio -- Trump had his moment. I wouldn't say he jumped the shark, if only because "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark. But the numbers are running the wrong way. I mean, heartland Americans are acting sympathetic toward Puerto Ricans even though Trump specifically told them not to -- he even said "Puerto Rico" like it was black dialect at a Young Republican picnic to remind them that he was white and they weren't. Yet they sided with Chico against The Man. What's that tell you?

The thrill is gone. Women's marches and Trevor Noah didn't have much to do with it, and neither did common sense. The guy just wore out his welcome.

That doesn't mean he won't rise again in the polls. He'll kill some people, or applaud their killing, and that'll animate the base; he'll probably start a war, too, and some will always follow the bloody flag. But the cycles will be more normal, more responsive to the usual social and economic fluctuations than the testosterone surges of '16. Trump will golf and blab and tweet and roar just as Hammer had to haul out the parachute pants year after post-glory year. He'll still do a lot of damage, sure, but don't they all?

In short, the battle will be what it always has been, in reality -- against the rapacious, gun-crazed, life-hating, prion-diseased Republicans who need to be marched into the sea if we are to live. Probably a good thing we got the focus back on that.

COUP-COUP.

People (or at least memeorandum editors) keep directing my attention to Kurt Schlichter, a cartoon version of more skilled rightwing propagandists. I've fallen for his act before, because his writing is such overripe cheese that it's hard not to make fun of, as you can see from his latest offense and a typically reasonable section about how trying to make it easier for immigrants to become legal is like letting muggers go free:

Case in point – [Democrats'] bizarre embrace of illegal aliens. Democrats seem to think that foreigners who violate our laws have a greater right to determine what will be America's laws than actual Americans. After all, that's their argument when they whine because some illegal is getting shipped back to his Third World hellhole-of-origin. They seem to think that just because some uninvited, unwanted, unlegal trespasser (we’re not supposed to call them “illegal,” right?) has been violating our laws for an exceptionally long period of time makes his offense less offensive. Huh? That’s like saying getting slugged in the gut once is a no-no, but being pounded in the pancreas a couple dozen times is cool.

"Pounded in the pancreas," LOL. Sounds like he drilled alliteration in boot camp.  Like everything else he writes it's garbage, but I wanted to call attention to a section of the loony two-part fantasy he did earlier this week,  in which he imagines Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and other conservative boogiemen trying to take down Trump and ending up hanged for treason. It has all the hallmarks of an abuser's fantasy -- we might call it look-what-you-made-me-do fascism -- including an elaborately-constructed conspiracy of which the victim is guilty and a dryly indignant defense at the end ("Dissent had morphed into criminality, and it was now to be treated that way") explaining the regrettable necessity of you having to explain to people that you walked into a door.

Schlichter's current botch, interestingly, ends similarly -- "Donald Trump is a warning... If you somehow depose him via your smarmy shenanigans, what comes along next is really going to upset you," etc. Looking through Schlichter's oeuvre, we can detect a recent obsession with the theme of the libtard coup -- "This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves," "If The Left Wins Their Soft Coup, Everyone Loses," "This Is A Coup Against Our Right To Govern Ourselves," et alia.

I can only imagine what he's cooking up in his literary meth lab now that Mueller's got a grand jury going. Consonants could collide and concatenate catastrophically!

He's not the only one -- not with the consonants, but with the coup coup ka joob. Some examples:

• "'Silent Coup': Limbaugh Says DC Establishment Is 'Trying to Take Out' Trump" -- Fox News Insider
• "The Slow-Motion Coup d’Etat picks up steam" -- William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection
• "Dick Morris: The CIA ‘Silent Coup’ Against Donald Trump" -- National Enquirer (!!)
• "Treasonous Generals Isolating Trump In Preparation For Coup" -- Alex Jones ("this is the most important broadcast I've ever done," LOL) 

They have a lot of support -- not among the hinterland patriots they like to pretend will rise up to defend their TV buffoon, I'm guessing, but among all the other internet tough guys who jump on any opportunity for Turner Diaries cosplay -- like Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

The anti-Trump folks are making clear that they hate Trump more than they love America. But if the rules don’t apply, then the rules don’t apply. They won’t like it when the rules don’t apply.

Ooooh, scary! I love the idea of the Perfesser trying to muster his posse comitatus at the local gastropub: "Festus, you take your men up the post road to Washington. Seize what you need from the local gentry -- except for the names on this list, they're premium subscribers -- and don't worry, the Second Amendment trumps the Third, hehindeed. What's that? No, I agreed to a keg for your men, not craft beers! And bar snacks only, no entrees. Okay, everyone gets stuffed mushrooms but -- hey, what happened to my laptop?"

Can't wait to see Salena Zito and Chris Arnade comin' over that hill. Saddle my Schwinn!